HUME CRONYN and JESSICA TANDY: Two Lives, One Ambition

Everybody loves the Cronyns. Other actors hold them in awe, audiences adore them, and the critics long ago exhausted the ordinary words of praise to describe their performances. “Let us celebrate the Cronyns,” gushed the New York Daily News’s Douglas Watt when they last appeared on Broadway, in 1986. But then who could say anything bad about Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy, the husband and wife who, working together and separately, define acting in America?

Probably no one but Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy, who have been pointing out each other’s faults, professionally at least, for almost 50 years.

“Hume’s always taking notes on what I do wrong,” complains Tandy.

“So are you with me, darling,” responds Cronyn.

“But I usually forget to tell you about them.”

“Not always.”

Such affectionate banter, as exquisitely timed as a medieval court dance, cannot disguise the fact that, much as they might quibble, they not only expect criticism from each other, they want it. There is scarcely a conscious minute that they are not thinking and talking about acting. Performing is not a way of life for them, it is life. “Perhaps the Cronyns are the last true theater professionals,” says Mike Nichols, who directed them in one of their biggest hits, The Gin Game.

Unlike the Lunts — Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne — with whom they are often compared, the Cronyns do not insist on working together. Their most visible recent roles, in fact, have been done separately. For playing the lovably irascible lead in Driving Miss Daisy, Tandy was nominated for an Academy Award. The biggest commercial success of her career, as well as the most surprising hit of the past year, Daisy has so far made $70 million at the box office, an extraordinary sum for a movie without sex, violence or raunchy humor. Cronyn has not swept the field as his wife has this year, but he has won extravagant praise for his role in Age-Old Friends, a touching TV drama set in a nursing home.

Yet, as Tandy notes, “you pay a price for being separated,” and they clearly prefer working together, despite the sparks that sometimes ensue. “There is a tension that can build up,” says Cronyn. “Sometimes I’ve been helpful to Jess, but sometimes I’ve been a pain in the ass, and she will say, ‘Leave me alone! Let me do it my way! I can’t play your part; don’t you try to play mine.’ We work differently. When Jessie gets her teeth into something, she is totally obsessed by it. We will go home at night after a rehearsal, and I will be so tired that I will say, ‘Oh, please, God, show me to my bed and let me forget about it until tomorrow morning.’ Then I will hear her still rehearsing in the bathtub. Literally rehearsing! Absolutely literally!”

“It’s not a bad place for it,” she mildly ripostes.

“She’s absolutely marvelous!” he continues, not a bit deterred by the interruption. “We can be driving along the highway, having closed a play six months before, and Jessie will suddenly say, ‘I know how I should have done it!’

” ‘What? What?’ I will ask her. ‘What are you talking about? That last turn?’

” ‘No. In that last scene I should have . . .’ Oh, God, and I can’t even remember the name of the play!”

Cronyn, by contrast, goes to what many actors would call ludicrous lengths to research a part, taking endless notes in the process. “It’s fascinating to watch them work,” says Susan Cooper, who together with Cronyn wrote the script for Foxfire, another of the Cronyns’ major Broadway successes. “Hume starts from the outside, with how a character looks and acts, and then goes inside. Jessica starts from the inside and then goes out. She feels around between the lines and is more inclined not to want an image of her character until she is through. ‘Be patient with me,’ she will say to Hume. ‘I’m getting there.’ But they both end up with equally powerful characterizations.”

Besides being their most severe critics, the Cronyns are also their strongest supporters. “Jessie, I think, is the definitive actress,” says Cronyn. He is about to say something more, but she flusters him by raising her left leg high in the air and shouting Wheeeee! in mock celebration of such high praise.

“Well, you are!” he insists. “You love acting, you love your garden, you love reading, and you love your children. But your focus is that of a performer, whereas there are a lot of things I like doing. I’ve been a producer, a director and a sometime writer. I think Jess is a better actor than I am, but there are things I can do that she can’t. I’m more at home in * television and film than she is, for example. Now I’m going to say something good about us. I think we have marvelously and totally coincidentally been a wonderful team. I think I complement Jess, and I know Jess complements me.”

At various points during their marriage, the career of one has zoomed ahead of the other’s. Has there ever been any envy or resentment? “No!” they both answer. “I rejoice in Hume’s successes,” says Tandy. “We’re not really in competition. I mean, I can’t play his parts, and he can’t play mine — though he tries to sometimes.”

Earlier this year, Tandy, who is 80 and suffers from angina, took sick during their annual vacation in the Bahamas and was briefly hospitalized. “I was terribly worried about her,” says Cronyn. “We don’t have a telephone in the house. Until this year I thought it was a blessing. But in the past few weeks, we really could have used one.” She soon recovered, and these days Tandy is almost bubbly, vivacity itself. The best medicine for any actor is a hit, and Driving Miss Daisy, which received nine Oscar nominations, more than any other picture released in 1989, has given her a megadose of Hollywood penicillin. Although she has played character parts in several outstanding films over the years, The Desert Fox and Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds among them, until now she has never had the recognition in Hollywood that the theater world has accorded her for more than 40 years. Movie producers all but ignored her extraordinary range and talent.

She originated the role of Blanche DuBois in the 1947 production of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, and Broadway gave her the first of her three Tony Awards. (The other two were for The Gin Game and Foxfire.) But it was Vivien Leigh whom Hollywood later tapped to play poor, doomed Blanche in the screen version of Streetcar. Driving Miss Daisy has belatedly righted that old wrong. It has transformed Tandy into a movie star, and she is thrilled by the acclaim, which is even sweeter because it is so unexpected. “Oh, it’s wonderful!” she exclaims. “It’s just wonderful! I never before had a part like Miss Daisy in a movie. I always played almost cardboard characters.”

Born in London, Tandy knew early on what she wanted to be. Her father, who worked for a company that sold rope, died when she was twelve; yet despite hardships at home, her mother put together enough money to send her to an acting academy. Before the ’20s were over she was acting in the West End, and in 1932 she married a colleague, the late Jack Hawkins. She appeared in several Broadway productions during the ’30s but immigrated to the U.S. only in 1940, bringing her five-year-old daughter Susan with her.

Cronyn, who is 78, was also born in London — London, Ont., that is — but his family was as rich as Tandy’s had been poor. His father was one of Canada’s most prominent businessmen, as well as a Member of Parliament; his mother was a Labatt, as in Labatt’s beer. After making a brief bow to family sensibilities by attending McGill University, he headed south in the early ’30s, to Manhattan, where he studied acting. The great George Abbott gave him his first big break and taught him the rough-and-tumble art of farce, an athletic, physical approach to his craft that he has since used in more cerebral roles. Cronyn has also picked up his share of honors, including an Academy Award nomination for The Seventh Cross in 1944 and a Tony for playing Polonius in the 1964 production of Richard Burton’s Hamlet.

He too married within the profession — he met his first wife in acting school — but by 1940 he was divorced and free to court Tandy, which he did with his customary persistence and energy. After Tandy’s divorce from Hawkins in 1942, she and Cronyn were married in California, and it was there that they had two children. Christopher, 46, is a movie production manager. Tandy, 44, who was given her mother’s last name as her first name, went into the family business: she is an actress, and a good one. Through some miracle of casting she was even given the part of her father’s daughter in Age-Old Friends.

Home for the Cronyns, besides scores of dressing rooms in the U.S. and Britain, is a house in Connecticut, an apartment in Manhattan and a rented house on the Bahamian island of Great Exuma.

A small, wiry man with wispy hair, a fringe of white beard and seemingly inexhaustible energy, Cronyn is the organizer and designated worrier in the family, the one who moves them from place to place. “When we like to be rude, we call Hume ‘the Cruise Director,’ ” says Cooper. “Because if you’re not careful, he will plan your whole day for you. He sometimes frets a bit too much, but Jessica is used to it, and I think she enjoys it. He’s the one who has always made things work in their lives.”

While both Cronyns have enjoyed success in the movies and television — they even had their own TV series, The Marriage, in the ’50s — the theater is their first and last love. “The theater is Mother!” says Cronyn. “Thank God!” But Mother has changed since they were young, and they are not altogether pleased with how she looks today. “Very often people are not used to going to the theater,” says Tandy, “and they don’t understand that it’s not the same as watching television shows. Much more concentration is required of them. You can’t just turn and tell your friend what’s going on, something that happens a lot at matinees.”

“Our theater apes film and television,” adds Cronyn. “You’ll see it in scripts. Audiences now have far less tolerance for long passages of dialogue than they used to. And you can’t talk to me or to anybody my age in which you don’t hear a sort of old fart’s moan about the fact that it’s much more difficult now for kids to learn the craft of acting. They don’t have the opportunity. They don’t get it in TV or films. I think it’s important that actors do films, but I think they’re way ahead of the game if they’ve got a theatrical background. Actors like ourselves should be able to reproduce the same effect again and again and again and again. But actors who haven’t had a theater discipline can’t do that.”

Aside from unemployment, the actor’s worst enemy is typecasting. The Cronyns have resisted it throughout their careers, but now, in their advancing years, they are unhappily discovering that even they are not immune. These days most of the plays they are offered are set in nursing homes, dramas so depressing they are instantly filed in the wastebasket. Nursing homes? For these two dynamos? They have done enough of those parts and are not eager for more. Tandy longs for a role in just about anything by Athol Fugard, and Cronyn would like to play Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. He is too old, he reluctantly admits, to take on another Shakespearean favorite, Richard III.

When you are in love with acting, however, as these two actors are, you will take any challenging role, even if it is set in a nursing home. “Something comes through the air between an actor and the audience,” says Cronyn. “I think the right word is empathy. You can tell immediately if you’re not being heard, or if a lady is rattling a paper bag over in the sixth row, stage right, or if somebody has a bad cough. But the most magical moment in the theater is a silence so complete that you can’t even hear people breathe. It means that you’ve got them!”